it’s weird what you remember at odd times. as i was writing the original draft of this piece for yday, i was thinking about what my father told me… that back home, there was no meat anywhere to be found, relatively little of any other veggies, because he grew up in the hill land in the middle of vietnam. like hill peoples in other parts of the world, his region was poor as hell, the lack of fecundity causing the folks out there to depend on daikon to feed they families. like the irish with potatoes, they found a hundred hundred different ways to prepare daikon, it was fundamental to their cooking, to their way of life.

along with this, came the memory of my asking him how the hell the vietnamese managed to shrug off the yoke of french rule way back when. my father told me vietnamese are goddamn good in a fight, ’cause we’ve been fighting since light dawned on people, since lac long quan and au co went their separate ways. conflict is what we’re good at. we’re stubborn, we’re tough and we’re broke, so we can always make do. he went on to explain that this is also the reason why we can’t rule ourselves for shite… and why when you get a lot of vietnamese people in a room, give them alcohol, there will inevitably be at least four-five fights by the end of the night.

oh my people.

btw, fuck vivid dreaming. i had one of the most bittersweet dreams last night. woke up with a broken heart. shit was awful. i want normal people dreams.

i will be slamming tonight, 6 o clock at the bowery poetry club. you should roll through if you have time, i’d love to see your faces.

also, my team, Ronin Athletics, will be completing at Naga today, so wish ‘em best of luck.

april 3rd

daikons, donnybrooks, processed meat

dolan’s eyes widened
in incredulity
as i folded three weeks worth
of now-clean laundry, crammed it
into just one sports bag,
my smirk replied, if you think this is good
you ain’t ever seen asians on a road trip.

i remember my father and mother insisting
that because we were an american family
we’d eat meat with our meals, that their children
would have what they didn’t,
so the taste of spam, canned tuna and eel
eggs and devil ham
wreath my childhood like the aroma
of my mother’s heavy hand with the garlic

my father’s family back generations
could not coax anything but daikons
from the stubborn, war-weary womb
of their hills, so they made a hundred, hundred recipes
for daikon, depended on it
like the irish on potatoes, because hill folk
can always survive

i was too lazy to go to ikea
to buy bookshelves
so i made my own

… in a gas station bathroom
my friend david made good use of the wall street journal
after too much wack-ass chinese food

the vietnamese used rifles scavenged
begged and borrowed
to rise against the french, had no uniforms
‘cept what they could scrounge,
no armour but faith in the cause
with such they beat a power

david’s uncle hates his life
but will not abandon his family, his job
as a line cook in a pho restaurant
so every night, he drinks a bottle of cheap cognac
till now his face is splotched red
with cirrhosis, his sweat reeks with fermented sweetness
but he has never missed a day of work, his children
have food every night, clothes on their backs

they call ‘em field expedients
yah make do with what yah got
my life is full of ‘em

but you do what yah gotta with what yah got
it’s in my blood.

will be slamming at the bowery poetry club for their college slam tomorrow afternoon at 6. would LOVE to see you.

April 1st

ain’t want to be no hero, buy no farm

sisyphean remembrances
are penance for our momentary hubris,
the pyrrhic nature of our commitment

i took showers three, four times
a day to scour
the smell from my skin, the grit
that inevitably infiltrated
its way past coverings, wedged
itself where the straps pressed, the water
like balm on parched tongue
in a mouth dry from desert and ‘drenaline..

trying to draw comfort
from rumination, like humility
from a superpower, i draw
from the infertile grounds
upon which we lie
false foundations
falling away, the center no longer holding.

there will be debate
about blame, when it was no longer enough
and motivation, when esprit de corps
became the only tenable connections
drawing us firm.

duty, both weight and impetus
for boys with set eyes
and stubborn backs.

funerals for heroes, and the cowardice
of not wanting to be one.

april 2nd

small favors and tragedies

ball missing the net by a breadth’s breath
in a grand street pick up game
among immigrants who share
no language, no customs
nothing but their foreignness
and the comfort of pirouettes and epees,
the unspoken eloquence
of the game.

having no papers
for the first jay in months
after the worst day in years
… the evening before
a surprise drug test

losing the number
of the pretty girl
destined to break his heart

snapping your ankle, all the months
of recovery… just before
you stepped
onto a mine rigged
to take out your platoon

the train doors closing abruptly
in the hopeful eyed boy’s face, his mouth
twisted in a moue at his tardiness
as he fingers the ringbox
stuffed as deeply as he could
into the bottoms of his pocket
even as the woman who he is to see
goes over the words over and over again
till their sharpness wears down,

“i don’t love you anymore.”

this blogpost will not get all full of ruminations. instead i’m going to post a poem i wrote a long, long time ago, and have been editing recently.

but firstly, since for whatever reason, hella people find my site after googling how to say love in vietnamese, i would just like to say… it’s anh yeu em. simple, neh?

oh, and this is hella random, but i found a facebook group that has a bunch of people named hua in it. which trips me the hell out, because outside of my family, i’ve never met anyone with that name… it’s actually more common than i thought. whoa. it kinda gives me a warm sense of community and continuity, that other people share my surname. weird, but true.

onto the poem.

———————————————————–
a chinese restaurant

my homegirl katie tells me
‘people are fucking stupid.’

She comes to this conclusion
after working for more than a year at Mr. Wang’s China Grill.
And yes, before you ask, it’s really called that.
And yes, Mr. Wang is a dick.

I guess once someone’s spent any amount of time
working at a chinese restaurant, they grow a sense of cynicism
about the meaning of it all.

It’s been more than a year, more than long enough
for her to get sick of wiping windows, long nights
and longer days, shit ass crab wontons
a boss who doesn’t stop hitting on her,
old white people who assume she doesn’t speak English
just because she’ vietnamese, their grandsons
who try to kick game
with the two words they learned in mandarin, bratty kids
and even brattier parents.

‘And ni hao to you too’
‘No sir, we do not have spaghetti. This is a chinese restaurant.’
‘No ma’am, we can’t move your table because you don’t like the feng shui.’
‘Yes sir, general gao’s chicken is really authentic chinese food’
‘No, I will not go on a date with you.’
‘Yes sir, no sir’

The litany continues till she can see herself,
young woman who doesn’t know who she is yet,
going out back to the boxes she packaged earlier in the day,
grabbing her stuff, walking out.

She imagines saying, as a parting remark to her boss
‘Your food is shit, your customers are asssholes,
I’d rather date your eighty year old father.
Turn the light on, just because it’s low
doesn’t mean we can’t tell you’re ugly.’

But she’d never say something like that,
she’s too nice, kind hearted enough
to feel guilty about uncharitable thoughts

but wishes she could stop

stop smiling like she likes this shit, as if a dollar above the minimum
were worth the way her legs ache
and the feel of her hands, that her mother once told her
were her grandfather’s
a calligrapher back in the homeland

wishes she had the courage to say she hates working here,
hates doubting herself, hates the down economy
high gas prices and college loans

but she’s a fighter, struggled to bitch about it now

So, no wonder she says it,
‘People are fucking stupid.’

i tell her she’s right
i’m not stupid enough to argue with a vietnamese woman
when she has access to kitchen knives.

It’s six hundred miles of distance and two years since I’ve seen her last.
i tell her i love her,
that she’s more beautiful than she’d ever know
her hair windblown, her eyes stretched in a smile
the girl who’s too busy to find love

She laughs, thinking i’m faker than this restaurant’s ‘classic chinese cooking’,
and i grin like i always do, ‘cause ain’t no one have to believe it
for it to be true.

Maybe people really are stupid.

————————————

oh and i just wanted to plug some events for my boston and new york folks.

this friday in boston, boston progress arts collective will be throwing its monthly open mic series, east meets words at 9pm in cambridge at east meets west bookstore. dope name isn’t it? guess who thought of it?

sunday the 15th, sulu series will be doing our monthly series at the bowery poetry club at 9. the crazy and creative and wonderful kristina wong will be performing, as well as my hella dope talented homegirl cynthia lin.

much love. and let me leave you with this.

life is moments of heart pounding consciousness amid a klonopin haze.

View all New York City events at Eventful

with Singles Awareness Day coming up (when is Valentine’s day anyway?), the fact that i’ve been writing entirely too many love poems recently (ask to see them, they’re awful, but worth a laugh or two), and the fact that i’ve seen a few of my friends in healthy relationships wherein both partners care for and love each other, I decided I would write a ruminating post about love and romance and all those cheesy things.

boys like me love the concept of love.

but… maybe it’s because ideation and actualization are so fundamentally different, or because we’re afraid, or because any of myriad possibilities, we rarely get our shit together when it comes to love itself. and by we to say, those loveable fuckups who might be able to hook up, might be able to be with someone for a few months, may even have crazy torrid love affairs and fall in love with all the force of volcanic eruptions, but never have a relationship that lasts more than a month. am i a loveable fuckup? is there even such a thing? i guess that’s the worthwhile subject for another blog entry, or for your own input as readers, but i’ve been described as such, and rather like the appellation. btw, this isn’t to say i don’t like my lifestyle, i rather do. there is a an indescribable joy in falling love as if you were jumping off the empire state. but hey, we all get old. maybe i’m ready to settle down. stop laughing, it’s not that funny.

let me elucidate what i mean. who hasn’t heard the hip hop head who wants that ideal girl who deserves wifey status. how many shitty love poems have i written to some unattainable figure that is as out of proportion as barbie, even if not nearly as vacuous. yet, we never end up in something committed… and if it lasts longer than a few weeks, it’s inevitably unhealthy. personally, subconsciously, i realize i tend to drive away women who i believe to be stable, skirting the edges of relationships and preferencing the women who i know i will create stories with. dramatic women who respond to the sense of theatre in my own being, fire personalities who clash with my own in light shows that seem destined to rival the sun itself in intensity. and i’ve seen that happen with many of my friends, that they slowly but surely drive away those women that care about them enough to put up with their shit, in the pursuit of some dramatic fun that always ends up with them horribly drunk and emo in ktown at fucking four o clock in the morning and yelling at their friend who came to pick them up.

i guess on some level, it has to be because we idealize the wrong people growing up. it’s difficult to believe in the reality of deep abiding love when jay only recently hooked up with B and Naz did the nasty with pretty much everyone till only recently finding his woman. let’s not even talk about the bukowskis and ginsbergs of the world. and let’s face it, the cool kids growing up did not have steady relationships. jeebus, how often have we heard that assholes are the ones who get the girls one more time. i fricking HATE that saying (btw, the movie sex drive is retardo. do not watch unless you want to burn your eyes out. cheesy, morally reprehensible and NOT funny.)

maybe more than that is that so many boys like me have been burned. i’ve talked to a coupla guys about why they can’t get their shit together, can’t be in a steady healthy relationship and hella dudes recount something about either the one who got away or the one who burned them so bad it’s like third degree emotional scars.

but i guess there is still beauty in the fact that we so love the concept of love. that at the end of the day, we hold romance, not the valentine’s day kind, but the romance that says that there is something better, that the ideal is possible. and the fundamental hope that maybe, we can get our shit together or find the right girl or whatever it is and be that ideal, as long as this remains alive, i guess we’re still human, not merely sheeple or on haterade, and that is in and of itself beautiful.

what is even stranger is that most of the guys i’ve talked to about this CAN develop strong commitments to women… just never as a significant other. hell, to a certain degree, i’ve seen and experienced a certain dependence, a need for the nurturing and care and slap in the back of the head that the strong women in our lives provide. they put up with our idiocy, listen to us bitch, and occasionally drag us up from the barroom floor. these are the women that we love with such an abiding, incandescent love that even blood sibling-hood could not compare. i guess on some level, you can say i’m trying to rationalize away the misogynistic element of what i’m discussing. or maybe not. maybe i want to enshrine them and hold them in juxtaposition. or maybe i’m rambling.

bless the loveable fuckup. and to all those women whose hearts we break along the way, our sincerest apologies. except to the crazy ones who try to stab us for sleeping with their friend, which we really did not do, those women can go to hell. but really, without the ladies who care about us enough to usher us through the bad times, we’d have wandered even farther from the path than we have, and the bars would have even steadier customers.

thank you.

(did I just ramble on for like two pages? yes, yes I did.)

————————————————————-

can i just say, fucking A bj… why couldn’t you train harder? past that, i am never EVER speaking of this fight again. please do not mention it to me.

oh and DHK got robbed. the judges are either blind or stupid or both. i personally lean towards both.

machida is a demi-god and karate is cool again.

oh and lesson learned, never promise to take care of significantly larger and more belligerent drunk friends late at night. makes for an absolute shit evening.

furthermore, training for the first time in like 2 months is bloody awful. I got swept by like a dude who’s been playing for three months. epic fail.

———————————————————–

finally, I will be performing at Umass Amherst on Saturday, February 21, 2009. It’d be dope to see yall there. much love.

the new hotness at umass

btw, is it just me or is there hella teh lulz in the fact that i’m wearing aviators and a tshirt next to beautiful ladies dolled up in ao dai? i feel rather underdressed, but hey i’m an artist, we’re ’sposed to be able to get away with that shit.